I'm now sitting, sipping hella yum green tea and just existing at another one of my fave chicago cafes. cafe ennui. it should be noted, however, that i'm anything but painfully bored with my existence. what good is l'être et le néant if all it does is make you shudder? jean-paul sartre, with his gibblet chin, platonic relationship with simone de beauvoir and thinly schematized characters, is hardly the poster child for joie de vivre. i think i'd make a much better existentialist. it's just that whole life is absurd thing i can't seem to stomach.

Yo, the social make-up of this cafe is totally different now. it used to be the exclusive haunt of ailing college students, angsty à la carte poets, and pathological chess players. now, it's older, alot more gay, and more cultural and racially diverse than i remember it being: not that i'm counting or anything--but ok, i am--there's two arab guys talking. Lebanese, i think. there's a black woman kicking it over there. i see two people with gray, thing, stringy hair near the sandwich sign, several Loyola students, grad students, i think, working on papers, and to my right, one middle-aged woman is filling out papers, and another is drawing colorful looking symmetrical designs that remind me of compasses. and then there's a fair share of intense looking gay guys, some of whom are checking me out right now. . . it must be the lip ring. i guess it's hard not to sexualize people when they're so good at hurting themselves. when you're a little self-destructive, you're always partially erotic, because your pleasure is connected to the imminent loss of life, to your mortality, to your fear and loathing, and,i mean, what IS eros without emptiness, pain and loss? and what is a lip ring if not those very things? i mean, could i fetishize myself anymore than i already have? i deserve all the unwanted intense gay male attention i get basically, even if i don't like it.

On a more uplifting note, it feels so good being back in Chicago. did i mention that already? i'm sure i did. yesterday, chicas came out in droves on Michigan Avenue. It was a short skirt parade. . .

Talking to my brother, i have to say, it's confirmed a feeling i've been having for awhile, which is, that though i know i'll humbly accept my next assignment from the universe, wherever it takes me, there is a larger and larger part of me that really wants to move back to Chicago in a couple of months. but in order to do that, i have to either find temporary adjunct teaching positions here in chicago--which is doubtful but possible, or win the sparks prize--1:7 chance, depending on the aesthetic biases of the judge, mood and temperament when s/he reads my manuscript.

::

I stayed at my brother's apartment last night. it was the first time i slept right NEXT to a bale of hay. i'm serious. there was a huge brick the size of a large chest, of fucking HAY inside my brother's apartment, right next to my his "bed," which was basically some blankets on the floor. and then, my brother showed me his compost bucket, RIGHT NEXT TO HIS REFRIGERATOR, which just happened to be right next to his WORM BUCKET, i'm not joking, my brother has a plastic bin full of second stage compost that he feeds to worms. oh, that's fun, i thought. while other people have cats, my bro has WORMS. after i helped him cut his hair last night, i saw him dumping some of his old hair into the worm bin. what are you doing? i ask. oh, he said, they like hair.

Everytime i stay with my brother, it's like i'm transported into the third world again. there's no food in the fridge, there's no toilet paper, there are piles of clothes, little or no furniture, no snacks, but dammit, there's lots of soil, lots of dirt, there's cob balls on the altar, there's a bale of hay, and there's compost, decaying fruit, old hair and worms. god bless this boy. he hasn't lived in the gambia since 1997 and yet he STILL lives like a peace corps volunteer. who forgot to return to civilization.